Chapter 21
Colin had guys on the door of his room, private security: big men in polo shirts. Donna loathed them immediately, the one
on the right with his shaved head and stupid mustache, the one on the left with a fucking goatee. Her thought, absolutely
insane, was that Colin had hired the same freelance soldiers who had held her on Cherokee Island. But, of course, there had
been nothing left of Thermopylae Security by the time King Sorrow was done with them. Colin’s goons had to come from a different
outfit.
Although. When she looked at the bald one, at his hairy forearm, she thought she saw a shiny lump of scar tissue where a tattoo
had been removed.
One checked her driver’s license to make sure Donna was who she said she was. That bugged her too—she expected to be recognized,
if not actively lusted for, especially by middle-aged white guys. That was her target demographic. He unlatched the door and
pushed it open.
It was late and most of the lights were off, although the room was partially illuminated by some fluorescent underlighting
along the cabinets. Colin’s bed was elevated so he could sit up. His throat was swaddled in bandage. The first hit had taken
a fist-size chunk out of the side of his neck. A second bullet had struck his rib, and a splinter of bone had punched through
the lower right ventricle of his heart. It was a nine-hour surgery to remove it, and the wall of his heart had been permanently
damaged. His hands were bloated from edema, looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy’s hands. A third bullet had caught him in the
bladder. If he survived, he’d be pissing in a bag strapped to his leg for the rest of his life.
His hands were swollen and fat, but his face was starved. His eyes glittered in deep hollows. His face had never looked more skull-like. He patted the edge of the cot with a few sausage-plump fingers.
“Sit,” he said, giving orders like she was a dog.
She leaned her crutch against the wall and planted herself in a metal chair by the bed.
“Why do you need security? You’ve already got all the security you could ever want. It’s stamped on your chest.”
“Lot of good it did me. That was always a weak spot in King Sorrow’s protection, wasn’t it?” His voice was weak, raspy. “If
you’re asleep, or too slow, or unaware . . .” His voice drifted off. So did his gaze. He seemed to be having trouble focusing.
Finally, he said, “Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I was shot myself, remember?” she said, and lifted her foot in its bionic black boot.
“In the heel,” he said, dismissively. “You’ve been out of the hospital for days. No. Don’t bother explaining. I know. You
were drunk, am I right? We should do something about that when I’m back to a hundred percent. Allie might be onto something
with AA . . . and if you start going to meetings together you can get her back on our side before it’s too late.”
“You’re never going to be a hundred percent again, Colin,” Donna said. “Nothing can fix your damaged heart.” She did not say
she thought now it had always been damaged.
He said, “No. You’re wrong. I need you to listen to me carefully. There’s a glass flask in the Cabinet. It’s half-full of
blood—you’ll know it when you see it. I think I’ll need all of it, but if I don’t, we can dab what’s left on your heel and
maybe get rid of your limp. Bring it to me. I’ll have to drink some, and we’ll pour the last of it into my wounds. It doesn’t
work immediately, but it does work fast. I could be well enough to come home in a week. I might be fully recovered by June . . . and I do mean fully. Like
I was never shot at all. I hate to use it all up—it could’ve kept me fit and healthy for another sixty years—but we must adapt
to the situation.”
She opened her mouth and closed it, her mind going back over what he had just told her. It could’ve kept me fit and healthy for another sixty years. Yes. She had known that Colin wasn’t aging like she was, like any of them were. That the years went on, but his face remained
unlined, his eyes lively with youth, his body as fit and trim as a professional diver’s. He had not thought to mention what
he had found to her—to any of them.
“There’s something else,” he said. “Something we must do before I douse myself with what’s in the flask, with the blood of
St. Helen. King Sorrow will finish Gwen, but we’ve got other problems beyond her. There’s the Fellows woman and there’s Tana
Nighswander. There’s Allie too, but I’m hoping it’s not too late for her. We might yet bring her back to herself, make her
our old dependable Allie again. But the other two, they’ll move against us. They know it’s their lives or ours. And we can’t
wait for King Sorrow to get around to them in a year. Give them time and there won’t be any more King Sorrow. They know how
to kill him now, and they know when to strike—right after Easter, when he’s at his weakest. I think it’s long odds they could
pull it off . . . but long odds are not the same as impossible.”
“So are you going to have a couple guys drop in on ’em?” Donna asked. “Does your security service cover that kind of thing
too? Where’d you get ’em, anyway?”
“Who cares where I got them? No, we’re not going to use them. When we deal with Fellows and Nighswander, I don’t want it boomeranging
back on me, or on the company. There’s another way. There’s always been another way. King Sorrow isn’t our only Philip. I want to bring Elwood Hondo back. Just you and me. It’ll be easy because
I’m close to death. Right here, right now, I’m on the bridge over the Styx. Elwood will hear my voice quickly enough if we
call to him. We know he’ll be willing. He likes to kill. He prefers to strangle young men, but a couple middle-aged women
will do in a pinch. Boggarts can’t be choosers.”
“You want to make a deal with something else from the Long Dark? Because the deal with King Sorrow has worked out so great for us.”
“Didn’t it?”
“My brother jumped to his death so they wouldn’t torture us for information about the iguana anymore.
And look what it did to Gwen. Drove her out of her mind, made her the kind of person who gets off on killing sick old people.
” Donna paused, then added, “Kinda funny how that one snuck up on us. The woman we overheard in church sounded like the same decent old Gwen. You wouldn’t think a serial killer who preys on old folks would be so determined to protect the lives of her friends.
” What had Allie said? Donna can be very credulous about other people’s motives.
That one had stung almost as badly as Allie telling her to go fuck herself.
Colin shrugged. “I’m sure even when she euthanized her patients, she believed she was rescuing them in some manner. As you
know, she has a complex about rescuing people—if she was a man, we’d say she suffers from white knight syndrome. As for Van,
what happened to that kid broke my heart. We got high together, Van and me. He was my brother too.” It sounded good, but his
eyes, under their pink, sore eyelids, were dull and empty.
“What about Arthur? Was he like a brother too?”
“Arthur was my hero. What happened down in the cave killed me.”
“Metaphorically,” Donna said. “But in reality, what happened in the cave killed Arthur.”
“King Sorrow has cost us more than we ever imagined. But I think about the women you wiped out at Black Cricket and I know
it was worth it. Psychopaths. Pedophiles. How many kids will grow up healthy and well because you took that house full of
monsters off the board?”
“Arthur’s mother was in Black Cricket once. Was she one of those monsters?”
“Oh, come on. Stop that.” He squeezed her hand. “We’re the good guys in this story.”
She slipped her hand out of his. “You really think you can reach Elwood Hondo?”
“Bring the conch and Wolf Messing’s helmet and we’ll try. Hondo is so close, I can almost see him standing in the corner.”
She looked in the corner. It was dark there, a pocket of shadows. She felt a bad crawly sensation up the back of her neck and swiftly returned her gaze to Colin.
“Tell me something. The guys on the door. Do you think there’s any chance either of them worked with the same outfit that
held me ’n’ Van back on Cherokee Island?”
His eyelids sank shut. “I haven’t been in a state to examine their employment records. If they work for us now, does it even
matter?”
“You should rest. And I should go.”
“You’ll get the blood? And the rest of it? Conch and helmet?”
“Yes. Absolutely. As soon as I get back to Podomaquassy.”
He was breathing weakly when she let herself out.
She paused after she shut the door, glanced at the soldier with the pink shaved scalp and the old-fashioned handlebar mustache.
“You guys take care of him, okay?” she said.
“It’s what we do,” he said.
“How long has he had your company on contract? He told me the name of your outfit, but I already forgot.”
“It’s Rohan Security,” said the dude with the goatee. “Used to be something else, I forget what.”
The bald security guard carefully placed one hand over his forearm, to cover the shiny patch where it looked like a tattoo
had been removed.
Goatee jerked his head toward the doors and Colin on the other side. “You could ask him. I think he’s had the company on payroll
since the beginning. Twenty years?”
“No kidding,” Donna said.
The bald guy said, “Will you be back to see him tomorrow?”
“Not for a million fucking dollars,” she said, and got out of there, as swiftly as her crutch would carry her.
It was twenty-three days until Easter.